Method and sytem for providing collaborative tag sets to assist in the use and navigation of a folksonomy

Abstract

A system for providing collaborative tag sets to assist in the navigation and use of a folksonomy. The collaborative tag sets are social in nature. As more users group two tags together into tag sets, the disclosed system causes the association between those two tags to grow stronger, as exposed in the bookmark system user interface when alternative tags are suggested for browsing the bookmarks in a folksonomy. Tags that are grouped together by a user into a tag set have the strongest possible weight for that user, and accordingly the disclosed system automatically applies all tags in a set when that user is retrieving bookmarks if the user selects at least one of tags in the set. Tags not in the user's tag sets, but included in the public tag set(s) of another user(s) are displayed in the user interface as tag suggestions.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates generally to systems for categorizing content on the Web using tags, and more specifically to a method and system for providing collaborative tag sets to assist navigation of a folksonomy.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]As it is generally known, the phrase “Web 2.0” refers to a new generation of Web-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. Social bookmarking is thought of as a key Web 2.0 component. In a social bookmarking system, a social bookmarking Web site provides a mechanism for users to store, classify, search and share links (i.e. hyperlinks) as bookmarks. Users can save lists of bookmarks that may be shared or kept private. Users bookmark resources (e.g. Web pages) that are meaningful to them, and associate tags with bookmarks to create a folksonomy. A tag can be a keyword or label of some kind. The act of sharing bookmarks and tags makes such systems social in nature. Bookmarks in...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0010]To address the above described and other shortcomings of previous approaches, a new method and system are disclosed for providing collaborative tag sets to assist navigation of a folksonomy in a social bookmarking system. The collaborative tag sets of the disclosed system are social in nature. As more users group two tags together into tag sets, the disclosed system causes the association between those two tags to grow stronger. This stronger relationship between the two tags is exposed in the social bookmarking system user interface when alternative tags are suggested for browsing bookmarks in a folksonomy. Tags that are grouped together by a user into a tag set have the strongest possible weight for that user, and accordingly the disclosed system automatically applies all tags in a set when that user is retrieving bookmarks if the user selects at least one of tags in the set. Tags not in the user's tag sets, but included in the public tag set(s) of another user(s) are displayed in the user interface as tag suggestions, reflecting the social nature of other user's public tag sets.

[0018]The disclosed system provides many advantages over previous solutions. First, while some previous solutions have attempted to prevent tag inconsistency, the disclosed system advantageously addresses the problem of inconsistency after it occurs by harnessing the social bookmarking community's resources to form shared tags sets, in addition to a user's private tag sets. While some existing systems have attempted to disambiguate tags in association with specific bookmarks, the disclosed system enables users to create tag sets independently from specific bookmarks and / or resources.

[0019]The tag sets of the disclosed system can advantageously provide folksonomy representations of relationships existing as a result of end users tagging different bookmarks with similar terms (e.g. synonyms, differing stems, etc.). End users are advantageously allowed to create tag sets that contain semantically similar terms, and the resulting tag relationships are used to provide social benefit. The collaborative process of end users grouping different tags having similar or the same meaning provides significant benefits over using a fixed dictionary of synonyms in the same way that a folksonomy offers benefits over a fixed taxonomy. The community driven tag sets of the disclosed system enable a social bookmarking application to account for misspellings of tags, industry specific abbreviations, and an evolving vocabulary of synonyms. The strength of association of between two tag terms increases as more users group the two terms together. Moreover, unlike a standard folksonomy resulting from social bookmarking activities, the independently created tag set relationships of the disclosed system provide relationships between tags that are expressed independent of the act of tagging a specific resource.

Problems solved by technology

The frequent use of different terms having similar or identical meanings, different stems of the same term, and differences in case, all may result in ambiguities that don't exist when the tag space is fixed (e.g. defined in a controlled vocabulary that cannot be extended by end-users).

These ambiguities may inhibit effective and efficient information discovery, and there is accordingly a critical need for end users to communally express the relationships between such semantically related terms to overcome such limitations.

This approach, although enabling end users to tag with greater consistency, does not deal with ambiguities that nevertheless do arise in the tag space, because of inconsistencies in spelling, synonyms, and varying stems.

Similarly, systems providing auto-completion assistance to users entering new tag terms fail to address the use of synonyms with completely different spellings as different tags.

However, this only solves a small piece of the overall problem, and does not address the more significant problems arising from the use of tags that are synonyms, misspellings, varying stems, and / or differing word concatenations or combinations.

However, the tag bundles provided by existing systems are for the individual end user only, are not social in nature (i.e. not shared), and are used only to provide labeled visual grouping of tags in the end user's user interface.

This approach assists in distinguishing bookmarks based on the intended meaning of a tag, but does not aid in dealing with variations on a single tag (i.e. case, stems, similar terms, concatenation of terms etc.), since these groupings are based on how frequently two tags are used in a single bookmark.

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